Karin Bijsterveld
Sounds of the City. Fiction and Non-Fiction
The sounds of the city have been a source of inspiration for many novelists and composers, especially since the interwar years of the twentieth century. This lecture identifies and discusses four “auditory tropes” in how Western artists articulated and staged sensory experiences of the urban in the long twentieth century: intrusive sound, sensational sound, comforting sound and sinister sound. It then takes these tropes as inroads into the ways in which twentieth-century urban dwellers tried to control the soundscapes of the city, and the controversies as well as solutions resulting from their attempts. It ends by showing how some the most recent movements for soundscape awareness have been deeply influenced by artistic articulations of urban soundscapes.
Karin Bijsterveld is historian and professor of Science, Technology and Modern Culture at Maastricht University. She is author of Mechanical Sound: Technology, Culture, and Public Problems of Noise in the Twentieth Century (MIT Press, 2008), co-editor of the Oxford Handbook of Sound Studies (Oxford UP 2012, with Trevor Pinch) and co-editor of Sound Souvenirs: Audio Technologies, Memory and Cultural Practices (Amsterdam UP 2009, with José van Dijck). Two recent publications are the edited volume Soundscapes of the Urban Past: Staged Sound as Mediated Cultural Heritage (Transcript 2013), and the monograph Sound and Safe: A History of Listening behind the Wheel (Oxford UP 2014, with Eefje Cleophas, Stefan Krebs & Gijs Mom). She is currently working on the book-length essay “Sonic Skills” (Palgrave Pivot, forthcoming).
Followed by:
8 PM
Concert with KAPmodern Ensemble, Potsdam
Klangspaziergang
Venue: Foyer des Nikolaisaals, Wilhelm-Staab-Str. 11, Potsdam
Tickets: 15/12 €;
www.kammerakademie-potsdam.de
